I am the author of 16 books on artificial intelligence and the semantic web. I use this blog to share ideas and code snippets using my favorite languages: Clojure, Java, Haskell, Common Lisp, and Ruby.

Monday, June 04, 2007

Why the complaints over purchaser's name embedded in Apple's non-DRMed music?

I do not understand the complaints! If I buy non-DRMed music that I am free to personally use the rest of my life on any device that I own, why should I care if my name is watermarked in the music? This music is not supposed to be shared with other people anyway - fair enough.

Apple did do something recently that I did not like: they made it more difficult to generate MP3 files. I use 2 cheap generic MP3 players, and not iPods so I do need MP3 files generated from what I purchase. I have seen some workarounds listed on the web, but it is an inconvenience. I suspect that there is a strong connection between the watermarking and the difficulty in converting to MP3s that would obviously lose the watermarking. It seems to me that Apple should have made the new version of iTunes make it very easy to generate MP3s, but have the conversion process copy the watermark - I would not care about that. Looks like Apple does not want to make using generic MP3 palyers with iTunes an easy process - I understand this but don't like it.